Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 25)

Interim: a Visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

I was in Washington last week and, as I usually do when I am in that city, took time to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. And, as usual, I found myself tearing up. I visit out of respect for all those young men and a few women who gave their lives in our war. It does not really matter whether we approve of the country’s wars or not, the sacrifice deserves respect. Still, though, I had been reviewing Vivian Shipley’s recent collection of poems, All Your Memories Have Been Erased, just before I left for D.C. and could not help remembering her poem for the students killed at Virginia Tech and the haunting line about how they were cut off “mid-song.” The human beings represented by the names carved into that black wall were also only part way through singing their own songs when their voices were lost to us all.

I was rushed on this visit and took a taxi from the conference hotel to the memorial. The cabbie seemed used to Vietnam veterans rushing to the Wall and asked if I had been there, meaning Vietnam. When I said yes, he said he'd wait for me on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial. The area was totally under repair, reflecting pool drained, walkways rerouted, but the Wall...it still called out to people. The last time I was there a few kids were racing around and their parents were shushing them, asking them to behave. I remember telling them that the people represented by the names would not have minded, that that kind of happiness and joy was okay with them. This time, though, only a few of us, no cherry trees in bloom, no laughing children.

The first few times I visited The Wall, I did not feel that sense of healing some veterans have mentioned, instead. . . Well, I’ve written a few poems, none recently, about how the memorial makes me feel. The first was originally published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and was about a trip I took to the memorial with my friend Pat Valdata. Pat’s a glider pilot and writer and she was a good companion on that walk up the reflection pond to the Lincoln Memorial before we turned right to visit Maya Lin’s tribute:

New Names

1
Cherry blossoms blow along the ground
and green buds promise leaves to come,
closed walkways send us west and nothing's
mirrored in the murky pond.

She notes that gulls soar much as she does
when the clouds build just this way.
She paces me, stride for stride, sees
mallards, heads buried in the slime.

She seems entranced with winged things.

2
Here, the cherries blossom still—a little
north and east of where we stand.
The path leads down beside a polished wall
that sprouts the names of one war's dead.

New faces blossom, new letters grow
from black wings struggling to rise, but
anchored in the hill and in our minds.

New names to link old remains—men
and women who will not grow old.
The wings reflect, although the pond does not,
cherry blossoms in the April sun.

I have returned to the place many times in the intervening years and, each time, the memorial affects me in a different way. The image of “wings,” though: that is constant. When I last wrote about the memorial, I was thinking of the young man named Bao who reported on the camp at Dak To and about what was, surely, his own death after we had pinpointed his locations:

Not All the Names Are There

I said I would not write about the Wall,
two wings of black marble with 58,000 names.
I knew not all the names were there, not all.

They said the Wall brings healing, peace,
understanding. They never mentioned rage.
I knew I should not write about the Wall.

A boy named Bao lay dying on a hill,
his body burned with napalm, his death my call.
I knew not all the names were there, I could not

see his name and face behind the marble sheen
neither on the west nor on the east, no trace.
No one wrote his name upon the Wall.

No one ever mentioned tears could fall and rage
could dominate between those wings of black carved names.
I said I would not write about the Wall;
not all the names can fit there, hardly all.

This time, the visit brought regret. I think the truth about the Wall is that it does not simply reflect our faces against the carved names of the dead in the black mirror polish of its exterior, but also reflects the baggage we bring with us. This is Maya Lin’s real achievement: that the memorial is different for each man or woman who sees it, just as our war was different for each person who fought in it. We do not simply see their names, but see our whole lives since theirs were lost.

January 30, 1968, was neither warm nor cold in the area around Pleiku, but it was a day many new names would become eligible for the stone carver’s art. Allen, Jim, Will, all of us who worked in the linguist hootch at the 330th and all the cryppies, reporters, diddy-boppers, mechanics, cooks, all of us, knew the morning would change the course of the war and would, simultaneously, change dramatically, the way we would live out the remainder of our tour in Vietnam.